Document indexing queue assignmentCodingAssign incoming documents to indexing workers across queues so the load stays balanced as documents arrive. Reported on 1point3acres' Glean bank; reconstructed in our own words.
Last asked Sep 2026
#search
+8Design typeahead suggestionsSystem designSuggest completions as the user types into a search box, within tens of milliseconds, ranked by popularity and fresh with trending queries.Last asked Sep 2026
+7Design a Slack-like chat systemSystem designWorkspaces, channels, threads and direct messages with real-time delivery, unread state, search and history, for large companies.Last asked Sep 2026
Locate vehicles with a square-region query APICodingAn API answers whether any vehicle lies inside a given square region. Use it to find every vehicle's location. Clarify the search bounds, how precise positions must be and how to…Last asked Sep 2026- +3Design a nearby points-of-interest serviceSystem designGiven a user's location, return the closest restaurants, shops and other places of interest within a radius, fast, for a read-heavy global audience.Last asked Sep 2026
Card game: pick cards that sum to 15CodingYou get a small existing codebase for a card game played with a 36-card deck, and you may use an AI assistant. The game revolves around picking cards whose values add up to 15…Last asked Sep 2026
Fast search over large autonomous-vehicle logsSystem designVehicles produce large raw logs and vehicle records. Design how engineers search them quickly, for example for every record that matches some conditions, when the data is far…Last asked Aug 2026
Design a project-to-contractor matching systemSystem designDesign a system that matches projects needing work done with contractors who can do it: how projects and contractor profiles are stored and indexed, how candidates are found and…Last asked Aug 2026
Design faceted product searchSystem designDesign product search for a large catalog where shoppers narrow results with facets (filters on product attributes) and see how many results each filter value has. Cover indexing…Last asked Aug 2026- Design a distributed crossword solverSystem designGiven a large crossword grid with about a hundred slots and a dictionary of around a million words, design a service that fills the grid. One machine cannot search the space fast…Last asked Aug 2026
- +2Design permission-aware enterprise searchAI system designDesign search across every app a company uses (Drive, Confluence, Slack, Jira, GitHub, email and more) from one search box, plus an assistant that answers from the results. Nobody…Last asked Aug 2026
- Design search over user posts with boolean queriesSystem designDesign search over users' status posts on a large social network. Queries combine words with AND and OR (for example cats AND (dogs OR birds)), and new posts should become…Last asked Aug 2026
- +5Design a logging serviceSystem designIngest logs from every service at terabytes per day, make them searchable within seconds, and keep them cheaply for months.Last asked Aug 2026
Find a repeating command program for a vehicle under fuel and memory limitsCodingA vehicle on a grid starts at a given cell with 100 fuel. Each move up, down, left or right costs one unit; at a station it can refuel 50 units; obstacles block movement. It can…Last asked Jun 2026- +3Design a hotel booking systemSystem designSearch hotels by place and dates, show availability and prices, and book rooms without double-booking, including holds and cancellations.Last asked Jun 2026
Design an audit log serviceSystem designDesign a service that records who did what to which resource across a platform, for security and compliance. Cover the event schema, how producers write reliably without slowing…Last asked Jun 2026
Match tagged problems to skilled programmers at scaleSystem designProblems carry tags and programmers have skills. Design a service that matches each new problem to programmers who are good at its tags, at large scale. Cover the data model, the…Last asked Jun 2026
Design a customer support ticketing systemSystem designCustomers open tickets by email, chat or web; agents get them routed by skill and priority, with SLAs, escalation and full history.Last asked Jun 2026
Word search in a straight lineCodingGiven an m x n grid of uppercase letters board and a string word, decide whether word appears in the grid along a straight line. A match starts at some cell and reads len(word)…Last asked May 2026- Store name autocompleteCodingImplement autocomplete over a set of store names: given the prefix typed so far, return the matching stores. Discuss a trie against simpler options, how many results to return and…Last asked May 2026
- Design candidate search for a talent marketplaceML designDesign a system that lets a company search for candidates and ranks them for a role: how candidate profiles are represented and indexed, how a query or job description retrieves…Last asked May 2026
- +1Design YelpSystem designFind businesses near a location by category and rating, read and write reviews and photos, for a read-heavy audience.Last asked May 2026
- Semantic search with user embeddingsML designDesign search that uses embeddings of users together with embeddings of listings, so results match both the request and the person searching. Cover how the user and item…Last asked Apr 2026
Sliding puzzle: fewest moves to solve the 15-puzzleCodingGiven a 4x4 sliding puzzle with one blank, return the fewest moves to reach the solved board, or report that it cannot be solved. Discuss the solvability check, BFS versus A or…Last asked Feb 2026- Move instructions for a robot that cannot see the mazeCodingA robot is in a 2D maze but cannot see it. Produce the sequence of move instructions that gets it to the goal, under the rules the interviewer gives for what happens when a move…Last asked Jan 2026
Design app store searchML designDesign search for an app store: the user types a query and gets a ranked list of apps. Cover query understanding (spelling, intent), retrieval, ranking features and models…Last asked Dec 2025- Design news search and feeds without MLSystem designDesign a first version of a news app's search and article feeds without any learned models. Cover ingesting articles from publishers, building the search index, ranking by simple…Last asked Dec 2025
- Design search for a food delivery appSystem designDesign the search box of a food delivery app: users type a query and get restaurants and dishes that can deliver to them. Cover indexing restaurants and menus, filtering by…Last asked Nov 2025
- Design a flight search serviceSystem designDesign a service where users search flights by origin, destination and dates and see prices and availability. Cover where fare data comes from and how fresh it must be, caching…Last asked Oct 2025
- Fewest guesses in Wordle with green feedback onlyCodingA secret five-letter word must be found, and the only feedback is, for a guess, which positions hold the right letter. Design a guessing strategy that finds the word in as few…Last asked Oct 2025
Find a way out of a restricted map zoneCodingGiven a starting latitude and longitude and a function that says whether a point is inside a premium zone, return a path that leaves the zone, or a nearby point outside it…Last asked Oct 2025- Design keyword search over postsSystem designUsers publish short posts or status updates; others search them by keyword, including over years of history, and see the matching posts ranked. Cover ingesting new posts into the…Last asked Oct 2025
- Bag-of-words similarity search from scratchCodingBuild a small similarity search with no libraries: tokenize the documents, turn each into a bag-of-words vector, write a similarity function such as cosine similarity, and return…Last asked Aug 2025
- Design an online bookstoreSystem designBrowse and search a catalog, keep a cart, check out and track orders, without overselling limited stock.Last asked Jul 2025
- Search keyword suggestions for an app storeML designDesign the pipeline that suggests search keywords in an app store, for example suggesting game genres when someone searches for games. Cover the data, generating candidate…Last asked Jul 2025
Predictive text for a phone keypadCodingOn a phone keypad each digit maps to several letters (2 = abc, 3 = def, ...). Given a dictionary and a sequence of digit presses, return the words the sequence could spell, T9…Last asked Jun 2025- Design an answer engine with citationsAI system designDesign an answer engine: a user asks a question in plain language and gets a direct, current answer written by a model, with numbered citations to the web pages it used, streaming…